How William Whatcott became the spark behind Canadian hate-speech ruling

Wednesday, the Supreme Court of Canada will release its long-awaited decision in the case of Saskatchewan Human Rights Commission vs. William Whatcott. After more than 16 months of deliberation, the justices will render a judgment that defines the range of free expression in this country.

At the centre of this case is Bill Whatcott, a controversial Saskatchewan-based social conservative who says exactly what is on his mind. In 2001 and 2002, Whatcott distributed homemade flyers throughout Canada. In one, he challenged a proposal to teach students in Grades 3 and 4 about homosexuality, stating: “Our children will pay the price in disease, death, abuse and ultimately eternal judgment if we do not say no to the sodomite desire to socialize your children into accepting something that is clearly wrong.” In another flyer, Whatcott ranted against the participation of the Toronto school board in a gay pride parade: “If Saskatchewan’s sodomites have their way, your school board will be celebrating buggery too!”

From a littering ticket to the Supreme Court, via a Heterosexual Family Pride Parade that got him mocked as a closeted gay on the Daily Show, William “Bill” Whatcott of Regina has always been an awkward revolutionary.

But when the Court of Appeal for Saskatchewan ruled in 2010 that his anti-gay fliers were not hate speech, as the province’s human rights tribunal had found, but rather a “polemical and impolite” contribution to a matter of public interest, he became the Supreme Court’s modern test case for Canada’s legal approach to hate.

A sexual purist and Christian fundamentalist who regrets his own homosexual conduct during a youthful period of drug use and criminality, Mr. Whatcott’s top court hearing focused on his claim that, in fact, he loves homosexuals, in the Christian sense, and it is only their conduct he denounces as filthy and corrupt.

He does so vigorously, despite many citations and charges, and was even stopped by police the night before his 2011 Supreme Court hearing in Ottawa.

On Wednesday morning, the Supreme Court will announce its decision on whether this zeal reflects a constitutionally protected religious imperative, or a flimsy excuse for hate speech. The ruling, which is expected to revisit a 20-year-old legal definition of hate, could decide the fate of not only Saskatchewan’s human rights law against hate speech, but others around the country, including the federal ban on internet hate speech, known as Section 13.

As a single-issue political candidate (double if you count abortion), Mr. Whatcott — by profession a nurse — has lost elections in Toronto and Regina. As a protester, he has roused dissent against everything from the Tom Green movie Freddie Got Fingered and mercy killer Robert Latimer to anti-Stockwell Day sentiment in the media.

He has been a relentless pursuer of attention, and caused headaches for media, such as the Regina Leader-Post, which in 2000 apologized for printing a letter he wrote containing information “that was clearly inaccurate about NDP MP Svend Robinson,” Canada’s first openly gay MP. A Saskatchewan cable company also edited his segment out of a mayoralty debate because it was “clearly defamatory of numerous individuals and organizations.”

In Mexico City in 2000, he got wide media coverage for joining anti-abortion activists trying to shut down a clinic. He later protested a queer film festival in Regina with 11 of his Christian Truth Activists. Somewhat ironically, he threatened to file a human rights complaint of his own if Regina refused his request to declare Heterosexual Family Pride Day in Regina, described in a National Post report as “a sparsely attended parade promoting anti-gay and anti-abortion messages.”

That led to an appearance on Jon Stewart’s Daily Show, in a clip called “Oot of the Closet,” in which the actor Ed Helms mocked the persecution Mr. Whatcott suffers as a heterosexual in Canada, “our gay neighbour to the north.”

A $90 ticket for littering in 2001, for putting leaflets on cars at the University of Regina, led to a Charter challenge that he lost, but won on appeal. Other charges, such as for obstructing traffic with anti-abortion signs, similarly failed.

The human rights complaints against him — which will be finally decided by Wednesday’s decision — were filed in 2002. Soon after, he was arrested for walking across the U.S. border to attend a gospel meeting.

At the Supreme Court, Mr. Whatcott’s lawyer Thomas Schuck described Mr. Whatcott as a former “street kid who used his body to pay for his drugs.” Another of his lawyers said he was a biker, and a “gay practitioner,” and that he is “not a sophisticated man… frankly inarticulate.”

“He doesn’t use the language of the cocktail party set around the dinner table in Rosedale,” said Iain Benson.

This may be true, but Mr. Whatcott is not exactly inarticulate, and in person does not come off as such a bumpkin.

He was not a biker, he said in a brief interview during the Supreme Court hearing, although he was a dangerous young man, abusing drugs to the point of prostituting himself with men in exchange for them. After a violent hijacking of a transit bus and hostage-taking of two teachers, he was sent to prison where he found religion.

Since then, as an activist, he has been convicted of littering and obstructing a police officer (both overturned on appeal), causing a disturbance, and he fought a finding of misconduct by the Saskatchewan Association of Licensed Practical Nurses all the way to victory at the Court of Appeal.

“I knew what all my words meant [in the fliers], and to call them hate is specious,” he said. They were “deliberately provocative.”